No. 7. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 517 



I spoke about cultivating the far away markets and sometimes in 

 neglecting the near ones at home. I have suffered from doing it, and 

 I am drifting more to the home market as a safe and sure friend 

 that it pays to stick to. In the rush of harvest in Georgia we bring 

 in some six or eight hundred colored laborers, and put them in 

 camps and huts there, and have a day watchman, and a night watch- 

 man. They sometimes- get into trouble, and when in trouble, we 

 bring them up before the local farm court — sometimes I am judge, 

 and sometimes I am prosecuting attorney and my. Superintendent 

 the judge — and we settle them right there, so as to keep them out 

 of the city and town courts, because if they get there, they will give 

 the offender pretty hard treatment; or if he is a scalawag we always 

 turn him over to the proper authorities and they usually put 

 him in the chain gang, or on the roads. Evidently many of you 

 don't expect to get into jail. How you expect to escape with the 

 many temptations in Harrisburg, I don't know. One Saturday night 

 our watchman discovered some colored gamblers who came over 

 from Savannah, and we arrested three, and sent them into town, and 

 the fourth one w^e arrested, and we did not know whether he was a 

 genuine gambler, or not, but we tried him before our own farm court 

 — I was judge on that occasion— and one old darky began to edge 

 his way up to the front, and took oft' his cap as he saluted me, and 

 he said " 'Sense me, Cap'n, you is Jedge, an' a very just Jedge," 

 (giving me a little taffy; he is the real thing when it comes to taffy); 

 he says ''Jedge, you ain't goin' thar right way to get the truth out 

 of these men; I'm a little older than you; 'sense me for interference", 

 and I said "No interference at all"; he said "I have experienced you 

 askin' these niggers who is in the game and who gets the money; my 

 experience in life is this: The nigger that wins never knows nothin'; 

 you have got to get the truth out of the nigger that loses." How 

 like us poor white trash when we are on easy street we don't squeal, 

 but just as soon as we begin to lose in the game, we tell the truth. 

 So I want to tell you out of experience of being pinched in distant 

 markets that your local markets are the best, if you want to get the 

 best net money out of your fruit. 



Pennsylvania has greater opportunities than any of the Eastern 

 states that I know of. I never ride through your State and look 

 out at the rolling hills, but what I feel that I would like to get a 

 few hundred thousand acres of those hills into orchards. Don't 

 fear the Southwest. Two years ago it cost me sixty-four thousand 

 dollars for railroad transportation alone to get my Georgia peaches 

 into the market. Now the lands I have had my eyes on, from what 

 I can see in traveling on the railroads, are your beautiful rolling 

 hills in grass. You also have a lot of chestnut ridges, and they are 

 the next to take up with a view to making them useful in this direc- 

 tion. In the last three or four years I have taken up three or four 

 hundred acres of land where there were chestnut sprouts grown up 

 and it was covered with rocks and stumps. When it came to assess- 

 ing the lands the men who owned them held up their right hands and 

 swore they were not worth more than three dollars an acre, and 

 when I wanted to buy them, they wanted twenty dollars an acre. I 

 have bought such lands prices varying from ten to thirty dollars an 

 acre, and cut down the trees, small brush and undergrowth and 

 planted them in peaches. At another location I picked on a hiU 



